April 12, 2012

Francesca Passoni and Cristina Cook's project, GoKey, completed as part of Prof. Martin Thaler's Product Design Workshop in Fall 2011 has been featured on FastCo Design. They launched their project on Kickstarter this week and are looking to garner $10000 worth of support.

March 30, 2012

A team of IIT Institute of Design graduate students (David Kodinsky, Tuduyen Annie Nguyen, Will Skelton, Parminder Kaur, Yu Yin) recently had their research paper accepted to the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012). DIS is a premier arena for designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers to come together, debate, and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. As part of my Fall 2011 Communication Design Workshop, and supported by Santosh Basapur at Motorola Mobility, this student team designed and prototyped a public interactive installation at the Design Research Conference 2011 to explore the use of gaming in encourage philanthropic giving. The accepted paper was peer reviewed; out of 449 papers submitted, only 89 were accepted in a double blind review (less than 20%).

David Kodinsky (who starts at IA Collaborative this Fall), and Tuduyen Annie Nguyen will be presenting the paper at DIS2012 in June at Newcastle, UK. Please join us if you are planning to attend the conference.

March 27, 2012

Mies Van Der Rohe turns 126 years today Mar 27, 2012. So Google decided to celebrate his birthday with a Doodle of the iconic Crown Hall (home of the IIT School of Architecture, and the old home of IIT Institute of Design). Google Doodles are "the fun, surprising and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists". Doodles are important because of Google's reach. In the past, Doodles have helped bring media attention to sometimes forgotten but often important icons, events, and people.

March 26, 2012

Steelcase is celebrating their 100 year anniversary by inviting 100 minds from around the world to dream 100 years into the future. ID's Dean Patrick Whitney is one of the dreamers. You can see his dream on Steelcase's 100.Steelcase website:

March 23, 2012

In December 2011, nine students from the IIT Institute of Design traveled to India on a three week program organized by ID and Godrej&Boyce Ltd. During these three weeks, they worked on a strategic project with nine executives and the VP of Innovation from Godrej&Boyce. They were part of new pilot program at ID called the India Immersion Program.

On Tuesday, March 20, 2012, join the presentation and discussion as Navroze Godrej, the students from the India Immersion Program, and I talked about our experiences during this program as well as the effect of this program on ID and future Immersion programs at ID.

March 02, 2012

A new post on BGR [http://bit.ly/xUX9Od] points to a NYT Op-Ed by the CEO of RIAA claiming that the Google and Wikipedia misrepresented SOPA and PIPA. Google, Wikipedia, and many others joined together to present the TAKE ACTION initiative on January 18. 2012. This initiative represents a first in internet lobbying where the influence of internet users persuaded Congress to drop SOPA and Senate to drop PIPA.

This new Op-Ed by Cary Sherman suggests that sites like Google and Wikipedia misrepresented SOPA and PIPA and the whole episode "[raises] questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age". It goes so far as to suggest that "the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.”". His point of view is based entirely on the premise that since it was coming from Google and Wikipedia, readers assumed it was appropriate.

All of this is very interesting to me because contrary to what Mr. Sherman suggests, the TAKE ACTION initiative is in fact democracy at its best in the digital age. Here are three reasons:

1) Mr. Sherman assumes I did not read about the bills. Wrong! What Google did exposed SOPA and PIPA to me. Then I used the resources of the digital age to read more about the bill. Only when I was clear about my position, did I "take action". Now I cannot assume everyone did this. But given my situation, I can only hope everyone did. In the same manner I can only hope that the supporters of the bill in the Senate and Congress did too when they took their initial and final position on the bills.

2) The ability to act or not act is the core aspect of a democracy. Google provided a opt-in platform to voice my concern for SOPA and PIPA. That's all it was - a platform. What makes the story work is that 7 million Americans responded and voiced their opinion. What if no one responded? What if no one felt this was an issue important enough for them to take action? Wouldn't the story play out differently today? The idea that when people act a certain way democracy turns into demagoguery only appeals to the person whose position was voted down.

3) Google and Wikipedia (and others not recognised in the article) did not coerce an action, they only suggested it. It is the people, the democracy that coerced the action. Those in the Senate and Congress did not have to listen to the initiative, they could have brushed it off...but they did. If SOPA and PIPA were as important to media space as Mr. Sherman suggests, why did the Senators and Congressmen act the way they did?

In any case, read the Op-Ed piece and decide for yourself. Once you do that, make sure you also read the flood of comments which followed - not one (as far as I can see) in favour of the opinion. Let me know what you think...

February 29, 2012

Steelcase is celebrating their 100 year anniversary by inviting 100 minds from around the world to dream 100 years into the future. ID's Prof. Vijay Kumar is one of the dreamers. You can see his dream on Steelcase's 100.Steelcase website:

February 08, 2012

On Saturday, Feb 4 I lectured at Gensler's North Central Partner Retreat at the Lodge in McDonald's Oak Brook campus. The topic of the session was Intelligent Cities. I followed Susan Piedmont-Palladino, Professor at VirginiaTech's Alexandria Center in DC and curator at the National Building Museum. Susan leads the Intelligent Cities initiative at the NBM.

The lecture was based on the work at IIT ID around Interactive Placemaking; it was followed by some energetic Q&A and a discussion between Susan and I.

I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 11th CII NID Design Summit held in Delhi on 8-9 December 2011.

The Summit featured some great keynotes from VIjay Kumar at IIT ID, and James Woudhuysen, Professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

I spoke about the move from an Industrial economy to an Information economy and what business and design can do to affect change in this context. The same presentation was also made to an interesting mix of business folks and designers in Mumbai at the invitation of Aparna Piramal (of the Piramal group and BP Ergo). Aparna writes extensively about therole of Design in Indian business and it was quite interesting have a conversation with a group hosted by her. The session was attended by Radhika Piramal (VIP), Devita Saraf (Vu Technologies), Ratan Batliboi, Preeti Vyas among others.

The event titled Reframing : Integrating Strategic Design thinking in the Boardroom Agenda was organised by CII and Godrej in conjunction with the ID-Godrej India Immersion Program. You can read an associated interview of Patrick Whitney in the Economic Times here.